


Journalists Behaving Badly

by nerdyvixen



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: F/M, Strand's gotta Strand, canon adjacent, no one gets paid enough for any of this, sexting as part of the scientific method
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-06 14:57:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17347304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdyvixen/pseuds/nerdyvixen
Summary: In which the only things getting boned harder than a journalist and the subject of her podcast are ethics in journalism and also the remnants of Nic Silver's composure.





	1. People and Places

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aproclivity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aproclivity/gifts).



****

****

**Three Weeks Ago**

In hindsight, Nic Silver realizes he should have figured out what was going on between Alex and Dr. Strand a _lot_ earlier. 

He’s known Alex for years--ever since college, both of them fresh-faced and young, shiny with ambition, raw-edged and unrefined. Time has done its dirty work, of course, making them sharper, more focused, careful, quicker; he’s turned to research, enjoying the control of pursuit, and then to editing to further that control, while Alex has weaponized her kindness and empathy to the point where she can pull a story from a conservative patriarch as easily as pulling the tab off a soda can. Her smile, he knows, can light up a room; her sympathy can soothe a storm. She is sincere and polite, every Canadian stereotype crammed into a five-foot-three frame. She wears flannel underneath soft gray sweaters, wears a bright red coat against the perpetual gloom of the Seattle autumn, wears glasses sometimes that make people look at her like she’s Clark Kent, and all of this combined is a careful, deliberate armor that hides drive, a furious curiosity, and, above all else, a desperate desire to unravel any fascinating story she comes across, just to see what makes it tick. 

He has cited Theseus and the Minotaur to her more than once in relation to unravelings. She has yet to listen. This is, he knows, Alex’s downfall: the weight of a narrative drags her down the path all willy-nilly and doesn’t particularly care if she meant to follow. It’s his lot in life, he figures, to follow his producing partner into the shadows and drag her back out when she gets in too deep. 

Judging by the amount of frankly filthy texts between her and one Richard Strand that he’s just uncovered, he’s probably a little too late on that one. 

“Jesus Christ, Alex,” he mutters to himself. He hadn’t _meant_ to look at her phone, not really--but of course he’d worried, and she'd never changed her passcode even after that creepy-ass message, and he’d _been_ worried for awhile, ever since that day six months ago when she’d come into the studio after a particularly nasty storm looking curiously revitalized for someone sleeping an average of four hours a night. Strand had been nowhere in sight for _days,_ and she’d been practically vibrating with nerves, and then there’d been that call from Simon Reese, and then there’d been three days of arguing, and _then_ she’d fucked off to Turkey, and _then_ Strand had stalked in and demanded to see her, and _then…_

_Received: I haven’t had you in two days. Come over tonight. Dinner. Maybe._  
_Received: Keep your recorder on this time._  
_Received: I believe it’s my turn for the burden of proof, my Alex. Let me prove to you exactly the symphony I can coax from your pretty mouth._  
_Received: I have time. I ache for you._

There is a new message at the bottom of the thread, an undownloaded image file that Nic refuses to touch. 

“It could be Strand’s dick,” he tells the air in Alex’s office, “and I don’t need that.” 

He doesn’t need _any_ of this, frankly; the compensation for emotional distress afforded to him by his contract is nonexistent, and he’s not going to try to argue it into being with the executives. The idea of explaining to Terry that yes, he went through Alex’s phone without her knowledge, and yes, it seems pretty damn clear that Alex and Strand are probably enthusiastically fucking, and yes, they’re still _technically_ investigating Strand, and yes, he himself works with Alex still and has for years and should know better--well, it only creates _more_ emotional distress, and that’s a feedback loop that will eat him alive. 

“I know she’s a grown woman,” he explains to the desktop monitor. “And he’s a grown man, and adults can do whatever with each other, and yeah, I know that’s _fine,_ but also, it’s really not fine.” There’s a notebook on her desk, hastily turned over as she bolted from the room. He’d wondered, when he’d wandered in to just say hello and ask if she wanted a coffee from the little shop around the corner, why she’d seemed so flushed and distracted, why she’d slammed her notebook over and stammered some half-assed excuse about needing to wash her face before darting out the door. 

_Received: I want you beneath me, naked and pliant, warm and soft.  
_ _Received: You’re so responsive. It is one of the purest delights I know. I want to feel every pleasured gasp in your throat, my Alex._

“So Strand’s a poet,” he tells the little hens and chicks succulent in its cheerfully hand-painted ceramic planter on her desk. “But only if involves dicking around with my producing partner. Heh. Dicking around--get it? Because his name’s Richard?” 

The hens and chicks plant remains silent. 

He frowns at it, settling Alex’s phone back on her desk. “I don’t know what I expected you to contribute to the conversation.” 

His eyes are drawn back with morbid fascination to the little notebook turned over on her desktop. He stares at it. It doesn’t, against all expectations, move, or burst into flames, or turn into some random erotic memento of what looks to be a moderately torrid affair. He plucks a pen from the cup on Alex’s desk and gingerly pokes it through the spiral binding looping along the edge of the notebook. It doesn’t bite. He steels himself, takes a deep breath, and then flips it over with the pen. 

The page is blank. 

“Oh, thank god,” he mutters. He’s not exactly sure what he expected--it’s not like Alex is going to draft a handwritten response to one of Strand’s sexts ( _oh god,_ he thinks, _I just thought the words ‘sexts’ and ‘Dr. Strand’ in the same sentence, and I’m pretty sure the world needs to end about three minutes ago now because that will never ever leave my brain_ )--but the blank page is… 

...reassuring? Perhaps? 

_Foreboding,_ whispers the part of his mind that looked at a murder forest in Russia and thought it was a good vacation spot. _This is the way the world ends--not with a bang, but with your colleagues banging._

He’s about ninety percent certain he needs to lie down. 

He shakes his head to clear it and drops the pen back into its cup; Alex will be back any moment, and there’s no way he can confront her now, not without more evidence, not without-- 

_\--is that a Post-It hidden under those pages?_

It is. The corner sticks out, hot pink and crumpled. He pokes it. It doesn’t move. He glances back at the door, but the hallway seems silent and still; the interns are all, for once, minding their own business, and Alex is still gone, and the Post-It is really just a frankly atrocious shade of pink-- 

He yanks it out before he can think any more on it. 

The edges are rumpled, yes, but overall, it’s flat and neat, marred only by a splash of coffee down one side. Words crowd the surface in Strand’s surprisingly relaxed handwriting: 

_To Polaris:_

_An old astronomer said it best--  
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night._

_You’re at the center of this with me._

It is a love note. _A love note,_ he realizes slowly, _and something she felt like she had to hide from me more than those texts from Strand._

“Oh,” says Nic to the obligingly silent succulent. “Well. Fuck." 

********

****

**Six Months Ago**

Alex shrieks when the power snaps out.

Her nerves are already on edge; with the tapes becoming increasingly less ghostly and increasingly more demonic, she’s wound taut, a string ready to plucked by the cold fingers of terror. This last tape has been particularly horrific, and she can’t remember the last time she slept more than a few hours uninterrupted. Realistically, she knows she can’t blame herself for jumping--fear is in the hindbrain, and she knows she’s running on fumes when it comes to survival instinct anyway--but immediately on the heels of her reaction is something even more hauntingly familiar.

It isn’t _quite_ anticipating Strand laughing at her, but it’s not _not_ anticipating him laughing at her, either.

“Sorry,” she apologizes into the darkness before he can react. “I wasn’t expecting that.” Silence, longer than it should be. “Richard? Are you okay?”

She hears him shuffle on the couch behind her. They’d set up her laptop on the coffee table, and she’d slid onto the floor to fiddle with the internet connection a few minutes prior. “I’m fine,” he answers, voice steady. “The rain--it must have knocked out a line somewhere.” He shifts again. “I can try to find the breaker box in the basement--”

“Do you have a flashlight somewhere? I can use my app, but it’ll drain the battery, and if the power’s out, I can’t charge my phone back up.” She fumbles for her phone on the table and unlocks it, wincing against the bright, blue-tinged light. Her eyes adjust quickly, and she flicks through her apps for the flashlight. The glow is too intense, but it’s better than the textured darkness; she’s seen what lurks there, and she’s not keen on seeing it again any time soon.

_Stare too long into a black tape,_ she thinks, _and the black tape stares back..._

“I forgot--” Strand starts before biting off the rest of the sentence.

She swings her phone around, aiming it at his chest so the light doesn’t blind him. “Forgot what?”

The outer edge of the halo of light from her phone catches on the faintest tinge of pink high on his cheeks. “I forgot that phones have the built-in flashlight,” he confesses quietly.

In spite of the residual adrenaline leaking from her, she laughs, then stops herself at the look on Strand’s face. “Sorry, I’m not laughing _at_ you,” she explains. “It’s just--you can disprove _anything,_ you have multiple degrees, you can pick apart story and equipment and _everything,_ but you don’t know how a torrent works, and you forgot that your phone has a built-in flashlight.” She feels her mouth turn up in a smile and tries to make her tone as kind as possible; for all his professed disbelief in ghosts, she knows Strand has more than his fair share, and the only thing that tends to keep them at bay is kindness.

He blinks at her. She raises the light a little to better see his face. The increased brightness tosses harsher shadows onto his cheekbones and drags deepness under his eyes, painting them an almost unearthly blue. He swallows, and the shadows on his throat ripple at the motion.

It is not the first time she’s noticed this, the way darkness paints him in the stark contrast he seems to see everything else in: real and imaginary, public and intensely private, him and her, the world and them. He looks almost fey in the shadows. He looks like he might eat her alive.

She’s not entirely sure she doesn’t want him to.

“Forgive me for focusing on more important things than a flashlight app,” he says drily.

She startles, abruptly brought back to reality. “What, like the weather report?”

“This _is_ Seattle,” he reminds her. “A dry autumn would be a viable sign of the end times.”

“A dry autumn,” she repeats. “Not, you know, cults. Demons. Apocalyptic symphonies. Math.”

“No, none of that,” he says, and the lights buzz and flicker back on, pulling the sharpness away and letting familiarity roll into its place. “That’s pedestrian. The world doesn’t end with a bang but an October in Seattle that doesn’t see three inches of rain.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not what T. S. Eliot had in mind when he wrote ‘The Hollow Men.’”

Strand grins, a little lopsided. “Semantics.”

It’s her turn to blink at him. “You are literally the first person who comes to mind when I wonder who actually _cares_ about semantics, you know.”

He shrugs. “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been thought of in a professional capacity.”

“You know I don’t just think about you in a professional capacity.”

The words are out of her mouth before she realizes their implication. His face abruptly freezes, the sudden tension coiled in his jaw belied by the wide, startled cast to his eyes. Her cheeks burn.

There are, she remembers distantly, certain intimacies that are fine to share with the subject of one’s stories--similar experiences, similar backgrounds, the small details that make the interviewer just human enough to be trustworthy. It’s fine to tell Strand about her mother giving her grief for not having a ring on her finger. It’s fine to rant about Nic’s particular brand of well-meaning micromanaging, about Terry and Paul’s kid-glove treatment of her when they think she’s just this side of going off the rails. It’s fine to make sure he eats, to get him a tea and know how he takes it. It’s fine to know his filing systems. It’s fine to know her way around his father’s house in the dark.

It is distinctly _less_ fine to imagine that he might look at her just a little too long sometimes. It is distinctly _less_ fine to wonder how to encourage that. It is distinctly _less_ fine to be able to pinpoint both the flash of concern and spark of attention in his eyes as he turns over that one _goddamn sentence_ in his head, checking it for cracks and lies. She sees the exact moment when he doesn’t find any, sees the precise bend in time when his eyebrows arch just that small bit--interest? _Is it interest?_

_Oh, fuck, I’ve said too much._

“Friends,” she splutters. “I mean, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

Outside, the wind howls. The house creaks. Strand’s expression cracks a little before settling into careful neutrality. “Yes, of course,” he says just a moment too late, just a touch too coldly. “Friends are hardly professional, after all.”

Her mouth twitches in irritation. _Just like him, getting huffy like this._ “Not the way I’m thinking, no.”

The neutral expression shudders on his face--in confusion, in disagreement, in some other vague emotion, she can’t say. “In what way _are_ you thinking, Alex?” he asks, and there is an entire universe behind his query.

_I’m_ not _thinking; that’s the problem--_

She opens her mouth to misdirect. She doesn’t want to lie straight out, not as a journalist, not as a person, not as a friend, but there’s not another way she can see to make it out of this conversation with her dignity intact--

The house creaks again in warning, just once, before there is a resounding, fizzling pop, and the room plunges back into darkness.

They both swear at the same time, and she hears Strand shift on the couch again. A moment later, his phone lights up. “The wind must have knocked out a power line,” he says, holding his phone aloft. The harsh white light falls on her, and for a moment, she feels like nothing more than a prisoner in an interrogation room. “I doubt the breakers will do anything.”

Mutely, she nods.

He doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t know what to say. For a long moment, he just stares at her, his face stony and impassive in the unforgiving light from his phone. She shifts under his scrutiny but does not look away, raising her chin defiantly. The stoicism in his eyes gives way to something else, something gentler, almost fearful, almost vulnerable, but also...

_Hungry?_

She blinks, feels her eyes widen, and now, _now_ she glances away from him, back into the rippling darkness, waiting for her eyes to adjust and for the heat to fade from her cheeks. Slowly, shapes and shades of darkness emerge (and she can still feel him watching her, can feel him waiting for her to say something, _anything_ , and the pressure is such that she is half-afraid she’ll burst before she can open her mouth), and to steady herself, she catalogues what she can see.

Roll-top desk. Antique lamp with the burnt-out bulb she told him to replace last week. Framed painting of the Palouse near Walla Walla. Bookshelf stuffed full but still organized due to the six hours they’d spent sorting everything a few nights back when it was too late to try to sleep but too early to head to the studio. End table. Grandfather clock. And--

“Richard?” Her voice trembles-- _she’s_ trembling, but that seems secondary to the cold knot of fear twisting low in her belly.

There is something in the corner.

There is something _tall_ in the corner, with long limbs and fingers, with deep red eyes, with a wide mouth, with teeth, so many teeth--

She opens her mouth to call for him again, but no sound comes out but a strangled whine. She can’t move; her limbs feel leaden, her pulse frozen. The tall figure tilts its head at her, baring more teeth until its mouth stretches open from ear to ear. The smell of something sweet and rotting hits her, and her stomach recoils, but she can’t move-- _she can’t move_ \--

“Alex?”

She recognizes the concern replacing defensiveness in his voice. She recognizes the shift in shadows as he slides off the couch to kneel next to her, his hands making brief but burning contact with her shoulders. But the _thing_ is still there, and there is a buzzing in her ears, and there is the stink of rot in her nose, and the tall figure rotates towards her with eerie grace, and she grabs Strand’s arm with one hand and points to the corner with the other.

She can see him frown out of the corner of her eye, but he wordlessly shines the phone in the corner, revealing--

\--a wall. Two walls, technically, painted in the soft neutral gray Ruby had picked out to make the room look bigger. There is a clock, and a bookshelf, and a desk. There is no tall figure. There is nothing rotting. There are the normal accessories and the normal detritus of Howard Strand but nothing else.

Her breath rasps in her throat. “Th-there was--Richard, I _saw_ it, I swear, it was right there…”

“What did you see?”

It takes a moment to register the gentleness in his voice, the way he hovers over her, the soft pressure of his hands on her arms before she drags her gaze away from the corner and up to his eyes.

_God, they’re really fucking blue._

Such a contrast, she realizes, from the deep red eyes of whatever it was she’d seen--Richard Strand, blue-eyed, coolly composed, but now just a little frayed around the edges. _He’s unsettled,_ the journalist in her notes. _He was worried. Concerned. And already off-kilter because you don’t have a damn filter._

_Focus, Reagan._

“Alex? What did you see?”

She squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head, then reaches up to lay her hand over his on her arm. He is reassuringly solid, reassuringly real, and distressingly close. “I know what you’re going to say. It’s what you always say.”

His grip tightens, just a little bit, but his tone is carefully light. “I didn’t realize you were psychic,” he tells her. “Should I write you the check now, then, or…?”

In spite of everything, she laughs. “Yeah, because a check for a million dollars is going to make me sleep tonight after seeing that _thing_ in the corner.”

“What thing?”

She bites her lip. “One of the tall men,” she admits. “It was--he was--really tall. Thin. Long limbs, long fingers. Red eyes. He had…” She shakes her head as if the gesture would dislodge the scent of rot from her memory. “God, I swear, he was _there,_ Richard.”

She sees him glance back at the corner, then back at her, and she braces herself for the inevitable tidal wave of educated scorn that is Richard Strand’s patented brand of debunking. Her fingers tighten on his. She’s so bone-weary that she doesn’t have time for this mess of emotion or potential demons or power outages or the faint sea wind smell that she’s grown to associate with the man who has, against all odds and expectations, managed to curl his frame around her protectively.

“I’m not making it up,” she says into the darkness.

A moment of stillness. A moment of silence. Then, so light and soft she almost misses it, warmth on her forehead, and Strand so close, and then the whisper against her skin: “I believe you.”

She blinks. “Richard…?”

His phone tumbles from his grasp and hits the floor with a clatter, and they both jump. “I should--in the office,” he says, too loudly, dropping his hold on her arms and fumbling for his phone on the floor. The light ekes through his fingers enough to show him gripping it like a lifeline. “Candles. I’ll get them.”

“What are you--” she starts, but he’s already staggering to his feet and stumbling around the couch towards his office. She stares after him.

_What the fuck, Richard?_

It takes only one more glance into the dappled darkness to convince her to get up and follow him. He has the benefit of familiarity and longer strides on her, and she is not surprised when she finds the office door closed. She frowns, then knocks. “Richard?”

There is no answer.

She shifts her weight from foot to foot, glancing behind her at the lightless hallway. The only illumination is her phone. The silence suspends her in a careful moment of liminality, caught between darkness and bright, alone and together, and outside the wind howls, and she thinks she can smell the rain and the rot.

She swallows back an instinctive spike of fear and unlocks her phone to her messages. Strand is, of course, the most recent contact, and she thumbs open the thread before hurriedly typing.

_Sent: Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make things weird. I’m kind of freaking out here so if you could let me know you’re not dead, that would be nice, thanks._

She sends it. A moment later, she hears the soft chime of Strand’s notification.

_I am absolutely not holding my breath and waiting for him to respond,_ she tells herself. _Absolutely not. Strong-willed and confident journalist out here. Yep. Not waiting at all--_

Her own phone dings, and she has the message open before she realizes she’s moved.

_Received: Did you mean it?_

“What?” she asks aloud, but before she can start to type a response, her phone dings again, twice.

_Received: Earlier, when you said you don’t think about me in a professional capacity._  
_Received: Did you mean it?_

She stares at the messages, then hurriedly types back:

_Sent: Is this really the time and place?_

_Received: It's always about people and places. Did you mean it?_

It _is_ always people and places to him; she knows this with the ingrained ease of instinct. She knows too that now the floor beneath them is fluid and pulling away, and one wrong step will drown her.

But there is darkness in the hall, and she is weary, and bravery lives between the here and the now, and so she takes a deep breath and sends back one word:

_Sent: Yes._

A chime. Silence.

A ding.

_Received: How did you mean it?_

_Sent: I mean I think about you often, and about half the time, the thoughts are unprofessional._

She stares at the message for longer than she wants to, then, before she can lose her nerve completely, hits send. The darkness presses around her, the light from her phone shrinking her visible world to a cool-edged sphere of illumination around her hands.

Another chime. More silence.

A ding.

_Received: What kind of unprofessional?_

She frowns.

_Sent: Why are you asking me this?_

_Received: You said I could disprove anything._  
_Received: But to do that, I need evidence._  
_Received: What kind of unprofessional, Alex?_

The steady dings of messages hammer into her ears, and through her pumps an irrational blend of irritation and interest. _All right,_ she thinks. _This is the way you want this to go, Richard? Fine. Better this than seeing things in your father’s living room._ Her thumb slides quickly over the keyboard, and she sends the messages in a flurry so she doesn’t stop to think too hard about them.

_Sent: The kind of unprofessional where I’ve thought about you intimately._  
_Sent: And before you ask_  
_Sent: Yes, that kind of intimately._  
_Sent: I’ve thought about what it would be like to kiss you, you know._  
_Sent: I’ve wondered what you taste like. Every time you have a tea, I wonder if I could catch the last hint of it from your mouth._  
_Sent: I’ve thought about kissing you when we share takeout on the couch, before we start the tapes, and I always wonder if I could just...distract you. Just enough. Just for a night._  
_Sent: Maybe more._

She can hear the chimes as the messages flood his phone, and she takes a deep breath to steady herself. Her fingers shake, just a little. She knows he's reading them. Around her, everything is strangely quiet. The power outage has robbed the atmosphere of its white noise, and now all she can hear is the rain, the wind, the creaking of the house, and her own breathing--

\--and a sharp inhale from the other side of the door, quickly stifled.

She presses her ear to door, suddenly, strangely wishing for an empty glass to hold against it, a hallmark of easier times to lighten the tension plucking at her heels. Her phone dings.

_Received: Distract me how?_

_Oh._ She tilts her head, considers the door and the man on the other side, then steels her shoulders and replies.

_Sent: All kinds of ways._  
_Sent: Sometimes I want to just...take your hand when we're walking. Or if you're driving us somewhere. I want to lace my fingers with yours and feel your pulse in your palm. I want to feel the warmth of your skin against mine._  
_Sent: Sometimes I want to curl up against you and close my eyes, see if I can still dream._  
_Sent: I've thought about that before, just pressing up against you on the couch. Tucking myself under your arm and wrapping my arms around you._  
_Sent: You smell like the sea, Richard. I went to the ferry the other day with Nic and I could have sworn you were there with me. I wanted you there with me._  
_Sent: I wanted to drive with you to a city where they don't know us and grab you by your coat and pull you down to me and kiss you in the street._  
_Sent: In the coffee shop._  
_Sent: In the hotel._

Chime after chime after chime, and then: another exhale, almost bordering on a groan. Intimacy, sexual or otherwise, has been a long time coming for both of them; she knows this, thanks to one conversation a few weeks prior that had been heavily lubricated by a very nice pinot noir.

_Received: In the hotel?_

She bites back a surge of smug pleasure.

_Sent: Yes._  
_Sent: The last one we went to--our rooms were at the end of the hall._  
_Sent: It took everything I had not to push you up against the door and drag you down so I could kiss you properly._  
_Sent: I wanted to taste you._  
_Sent: You bought that pinot noir and you kept talking about the topnotes and the waiter looked ready to slap you and all I wanted was to climb over the table and into your lap so I could taste the way the wine curled around my name on your tongue._

Strand's phone chimes repeatedly. She stares at the thread. The house creaks disapprovingly.

There is silence.

_Fuck,_ she thinks. _I went too far._

The silence is broken by a strangled inhale, and confidence bursts into her heart. She knows that sound. That same night-- _God, was it a few weeks back?_ \--she'd passed by him just a shade too close on the stairs, and the wine was warm in her veins, and she’d let her fingers drag down his arm, let them linger on his wrist while her eyes lingered on his.

He’d made that same strangled noise then, too.

_Sent: They don't talk about wine pairings with people you know._  
_Sent: But I want you with a red._  
_Sent: I want the wine and I want you to taste like saltwater. I want to swallow you and taste you on my lips and on my tongue and I want it to linger._  
_Sent: I want to taste you long after the bottle is empty._  
_Sent: So when I tell you I think about you in ways that don't fit into a professional capacity, Richard..._  
_Sent: ...I don't ever want you to doubt what I mean._

Chime, chime, chime, chime, chime, chime. Silence. Silence. Silence. It stretches around her and tugs at her nerves, and the light from her phone is suddenly harsh and cold.

_Ah, fuck._

The darkness presses against her skin, and she lets the phone screen fade to black. _I've fucked up,_ she tells herself, light-headed and giddy with dread. _I've fucked up, and Nic is going to shout at me, and Terry and Paul will pull the plug because I'm an idiot who couldn't keep it in my pants for a goddamn minute._ Her cheeks are burning. _This is--fuck, what am I even doing? We've played an apocalyptic symphony, and I thought there was a demon in the living room, and here I am, playing a grown-up version of 'do you like me check yes or no' with the subject of my podcast because apparently I go through journalism ethics the way Nic goes through girlfriends._

_God, I'm tired._

She rests her head against the door and closes her eyes. Embarrassment clogs her throat. _At this point,_ she thinks, _if it comes down to facing Strand or facing that demon I saw in the living room, I'm taking the demon in the living room._

Ding.

She jolts upright, her eyes flying open. Her notification light blinks at her, cheery and green. _Watch it be Nic,_ she tells herself. _Watch it be Nic, and then watch me spontaneously combust._ She swallows hard, then unlocks her phone and opens the message.

_Received: If I asked you, could I have you?_

She isn't sure what she expected, precisely--a clinically polite dismissal, perhaps, or a cold rejection, or a none-too-gentle reminder that their relationship should stay professional and that he plans to pack up his toys and go home after this debacle--but the text remains on the phone screen, stark and undeniably real.

_If I asked you, could I have you?_

She lets out an exhale in a hiss and bites her lip; such is the way that her mind works that she immediately wonders what being had would feel like, if Strand were the one doing the taking. She remembers Amalia, who was burning and bright and crashed into her life and her bed like a meteor. She remembers Nic and hopes he's gotten better with time. Strand is neither of them. Amalia was direct and illuminating, exploratory and daring; Nic was comfort and slow, sweet and routine. Both were exhausting in a way she could still not quite understand.

_If I asked you, could I have you?_

Strand is infuriating, confusing, volatile, and impassioned. He is stark contrast and possibilities, gentleness tucked within broad dismissals. He is grief and anger, lies and unravelings. He will demand, she muses, or perhaps he will never ask beyond this moment, and she will have to pull every want and need out of him until he finally, finally tells her what he craves. She hears him shift on the other side of the door, hears him draw in a breath and let it out slowly. She can picture him worrying his lip between his teeth.

_I want to have his lip between my teeth._

_Sent: Yes._

There is a chime, and the door opens not a second later. Strand visibly steadies himself, drawing confidence around him like a coat. "Alex," he murmurs.

"Richard," she says, and there is, again, a universe there.

It does not take long for her eyes to adjust to this new darkness, both their phones now at their sides. She can see his face, the hint of vulnerability in the dimness that curls up to his features. He reaches out and settles one hand on her waist experimentally.

"Can I have you?" he asks.

In a moment so layered she knows she will have to unfold it later, a truth unfurls with perfect clarity: Richard Strand is not asking for permission.

He is not asking for permission, but he _is_ asking for confirmation that the universe is shaped in such a way as to allow him to matter to her. She knows suddenly and as surely as she knows how much she cares for this man that he does not know how to fathom a world where he is allowed to have her at her own request, where he has earned the right to intimacy again, where he is worthy of something as simple as care or affection or want.

She takes a step towards him, feeling his hand slip around her waist to splay across her back and hold her close. She bites her lip, smiles. "You _may_ have me," she says, coyness giving way to frankness and--if she's being truthful--more than a little need.

His grip on her tightens. He tucks his phone into his pocket and slides his other arm around her, gathering her up close to his chest. She put her own phone away then curls one hand over his cheek to cup the line of his jaw and lets the other find purchase on the column of his neck.

_I want him. I want to taste him. I want--_

"I _may_ have you?" he repeats, his deep voice rasping across her nerves and making something low in her purr and thrum. “That’s not what I asked you, Alex.”

_This bastard knows exactly what I mean,_ she thinks, trying to suppress a shiver as his fingertips ghost up and down her spine.

But the faint annoyance at his smugness only makes everything better, more real, and she smiles at him and pulls him down to meet her in a kiss. "Semantics," she mutters against his mouth, and he laughs into her then tugs her into the room with him.


	2. A Philosophical Discussion About Ghosts

 

**Three Weeks Ago**

_Okay,_ Nic thinks to himself, a little too flummoxed to vocalize anything beyond ‘oh fuck’ or ‘I haven’t dropped acid in awhile but maybe I should start up again.’ _So it’s not just Alex scratching an itch by playing doctor with Strand. Heh. He’s a doctor. Not a medical doctor, but a doctor. He has the letters that could come after his name and everything._

_Focus, Silver._

He stares at the Post-It a moment longer before tucking it back into Alex’s notebook. _So someone caught feelings. Maybe it’s just Strand?_ He runs his fingertips over the blank page. The gesture reveals nothing. _Sure, because Strand has feelings--_

But that thought stops before it even comes close to completion. He’s heard the recordings. He’s helped edit most of them. To say Strand doesn’t have feelings is akin to insisting Seattle is a desert, and the rain beating against Alex’s office window agrees.

Strand has feelings. If the note tucked away is any indication, he has a lot of them.

Nic frowns. “So here’s the problem,” he says to the monitor, hoping it will be more responsive than the succulent. “Alex is too deep in this story already. And now Strand’s too deep in her--hold on, I should rephrase that.” Images bloom behind his eyes, unbidden and probably too close to accurate, and he shudders--there is something that sits uncomfortably close to voyeurism in picturing their intimacy. “Strand,” he says slowly, carefully, to the audience of office supplies, “is too _invested_ in Alex, and I don't know why, and--fuck, I was _right_ that time in Oregon.” He pushes his curls out of his eyes with a groan. “I knew I should've pushed more.”

The hens and chicks plant is sullenly silent.

“Listen, I don’t need this kind of lip from you,” he hisses at it. “I _knew._ I was at that bar with them. I was so sure he was touching her. God, he was probably--he was probably _sexting._ She kept texting someone, and I thought it was Strand, but I didn’t know, and they were probably--oh, God, that’s the second time today I’ve thought about that.”

He stops, then whirls around to the framed picture of the PNWS team on the wall behind him. “I don’t need to hear that from you, either. Who knows what _you’ve_ seen in here.”

From behind the glass, penned in by a simple black frame, a much-younger Alex with her arms looped around a much-younger Nic’s neck smiles at him, the expression broad and open and honest. His younger self grins at her, the gesture unseen as she keeps her eyes towards the camera. They both wear shirts with INTERNS NEVER SAY DIE scrawled across the front. He remembers that day--their last day as interns, both of them giddy from having just handed in official applications for positions at the studio. It had been hot, the swell of heat the last holdover from the summer, and the golden sun had coaxed freckles out on Alex’s bare shoulders while stroking a burn on his skin. They’d gone out for beers afterwards, then for pho, then for more beers, and somehow they’d made it back to his apartment and sprawled on the couch, a tangle of limbs and carefree drunkenness and affection. They hadn’t slept together that night--not colloquially, at least; Alex had passed out sometime around three in the morning, and he hadn’t lasted much longer--but they had been close, her hand idly moving through his riotous curls, his fingers somewhere between her hip and the tight nip in of her waist.

It strikes him, then, how much he misses her.

It strikes him, then, how much it stings that Strand is the one around her now.

“It’s not just that,” he says to the succulent, which seems to have lost most of its attitude. “I’m sort of her _boss._ She asked me to check her actions, and this...none of this is professional. At all. Like, this isn’t even _remotely_ in the area of ethical. Everything else aside, he’s still the subject of her show, and she has to maintain neutrality, and you can’t maintain neutrality when you’re dick-deep in someone.”

He pauses, waits for the succulent's rebuttal, receives none, shrugs, and barrels on.

“And Strand’s a liar. We’ve caught him lying. He lied about Cheryl, remember? And I’m not convinced he didn’t know Coralee was alive this whole time. He’s cagey, and I just--”

Alex’s phone dings. He looks over automatically.

_Received: I’m heading over to the studio. Be there in fifteen. Coffee?_

_Oh, shit._

Suddenly everything is painted in the harsh light of panic. _Strand is on his way over. Alex knows he’s on his way over--she plans everything. He probably had an appointment. I know she wanted to get another interview. She booked one of the booths, and if Strand has an appointment, then she knows what time he’ll be here, and she’ll want her phone--_

_I need to leave now._

He glances over her desk quickly, then flips the notebook back over before he can forget to. The electric hum of the lights is a buzzsaw across his nerves. He can hear chattering in the hallway, and his stomach drops-- _is she back already? What the hell was she even doing?_

He bolts for the door, ready to fling it open and dash, before he remembers to take a deep breath. _Okay. It’s been a little bit. You can always say you went back to your office and haven’t left the studio to get coffee yet. You just came back to...to see if she was back yet. Yeah. That’s it. It’s okay. She’ll be a little too on edge to question it if you move fast enough afterwards, Silver, and that’ll give you time to think of something else better._

_Breathe. Breathe. Breathe._

He opens the door carefully, ready to face Alex and whatever questions she’ll pin him to the wall with, but instead--

“Nic?” asks Moira, their longest-running intern. “What are you doing in Alex’s office?”

Adrenaline rushes through him: the thrill of nearly getting caught by Alex, the anxious pulse of wrongness, of everything, the way the light is too bright, the way everything is just _wrong (and it’s not the first time it’s felt like this, not since the forest, not since everything, when he can smell the pulse of the world around him and oh god oh god oh god he needs a fucking beer)--_

“Boss? You doin’ okay?”

He blinks owlishly at Moira. He can hear footsteps coming down the hall, just a little too quickly to be anything but Alex on a mission. _No time._ He tucks his arm through Moira’s and wheels her about sharply, heading towards the sound booths. “Moira,” he says brightly, jovially, and not at all in a way that indicates he is teetering on the unhinged side of things, “have I got a proposition for _you._ ”

 

**Five Months Ago**

_Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!_

Her phone, tinny and shrill, shrieks in her ear. Alex groans and buries her head in her pillow. Ever since getting back from Turkey, her already erratic sleep schedule has turned even more topsy-turvy, her nights punctuated by brief forays into REM cycles painted with strange, watery dreams. She is willing to blame this partially on the nasty cold she caught from the plane ride back that had her stuck at home for a week combined with the hellish rounds of edits Nic has her to work on; it’s easier than blaming it on the tall shadows she sees more often than not.

_If it’s something weird, and it won’t look good--_

She knows she should answer the phone--it’s definitely not her alarm, a pleasant nature-themed ringtone--but for once, her bed is warm and comfortable. This might be the first night she’s slept properly since that night at Strand’s a month ago--

_\--who you gonna call?_

_\--wait._

“Richard.” She bolts upright and scrambles for her phone. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, _fuck_ \--Richard! Hi!”

“Alex,” comes Strand’s deep voice from the other end of the phone line, and she can’t help but sink into it. “Am I interrupting something?”

“Ah...no. No, you’re not. Is something wrong?”

“I should be asking you the same.”

“I don’t understand.” She rubs her eyes, hoping the small gesture will banish the cobwebs from her brain. Things seem to be in order: two arms, two legs, two eyes, tangle of blankets, pillow kicked halfway across the bed, the rose-tinged sunlight of late morning slinking through the cracks in her blinds--

_Hold up._

“Fuck.” She pulls the phone away from her ear and waits for the screen to flash on. There are two notifications in the upper left corner: one for three text messages and one for three missed calls. More worrying, however, is the time--10:36 A.M. A perfectly normal sleeping-in, day-off sort of time, but a time that is also definitely an hour later than when she had planned to meet Strand at the studio. “Oregon. The rare books dealer. Richard, I’m so sorry. I...I actually fell asleep? I must have slept through my alarms--”

“But you’re all right?”

It takes a minute for the faint relief in his voice to sink through to her, and she ruthlessly ignores the warm burst of affection blooming in her ribs at the realization, focusing instead on practicality. “I’m fine. Just still having trouble getting back to a regular sleeping pattern.” She swings her feet over the edge of the bed and stands up, wobbling a little. “Turns out an eleven-hour time difference and a head cold will mess that right up. Okay, so I packed last night, I think. I think? I did. So I can just head over to you at the studio in a little bit. Are you okay with me meeting you there still, or...?”

There is a long silence on the other end of the phone line, and she pulls back her phone again to check and see if the call is still connected. “Richard? Hello? Are you there?”

“Eleven-hour time difference?”

_Fuck._ “Um. Yes?”

She can hear him draw in a deep breath and let it out with agonizing slowness. “Would this,” he says finally, “have anything to do with why I wasn’t able to get in touch with you for over a week last month? Why your producers refused to tell me where you’d gone? Why _you_ hadn’t told me where you’d gone? Why you _still_ haven’t told me where you’d gone?”

She swallows hard. Life had intervened enough that they had only encountered each other in passing just before and just after Turkey; the morning after the power outage, he’d had to leave for Chicago to do some paperwork he insisted Ruby couldn’t sign, then she’d gotten the call from Simon, which resulted in a three-day-long argument with her producers, and then she’d left, and then she’d gotten sick, and then Strand had his teaching and Nic had her working on so many edits that her head spun just thinking about it…

She hadn’t intended not to tell him, but she has the sinking certainty that Strand places as much faith in intent as he does in ghost stories. “...probably,” she tells him finally.

“Probably? That’s all you’re going to say? _Probably?_ ”

She winces at his tone. _This_ is why she hadn’t told him, really. Strand is passionate, impassioned, and while she’s seen now the more entertaining ways that can manifest ( _because goddamn, what he can do with that mouth should be illegal in the forty-eight contiguous states_ ), the dark side of it is this: he is possessive, hard-edged, and quick to anger, especially when he is caught unaware.

She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that I went to Turkey, but it happened so fast I barely had time to tell anyone--”

“You went to _Turkey?_ ”

“Well, Simon called,” she says, feeling both wretched and unable to stop talking, “and he asked me to--”

Silence. Sudden, heavy, bated silence.

_This is the way the world ends,_ whispers a little voice in her head. _Not with a bang, but with telling Richard that you gallivanted to the other side of the world on the whim of a convicted murderer._

“You went to Turkey,” he repeats slowly, “because Simon Reese, who was tried for _killing his parents,_ asked you to.”

“I...needed a vacation?” she offers.

“A vacation.” His voice is flat and brittle. “From common sense?”

“It was for the _story,_ Richard--”

“What story?” She can hear his voice shake even under his tight control. “The kind that comes in the form of an article explaining that you were last seen boarding a plane to a politically unstable country? The kind that comes in a cold case file? Is it _that_ story, Ms. Reagan?”

_Ms. Reagan. I’ve fucked up now._ The cold feeling of dread coiling in her throat only gets colder when she realizes that, for all of his vinegar and bile, Strand has a valid point. “It was--Richard, it was _important._ You know I wouldn’t just throw myself into danger if it wasn’t--”

“So you admit that you were doing something reckless.”

“Safety never tells a story,” she snaps at him.

“Oh, and of course the _story_ is the most important thing here,” he snaps back. “Not _you_ \--”

She draws in a sharp breath, harsh in the sudden, crackling silence from the other end of the line. “Richard--”

“I am rightfully furious,” he says, his voice tight, but she can hear, underneath the tense knot of anger in his voice, the low thrum of concern. “I thought you were smarter than that, Alex.”

Her heart twinges. She knows enough of his own personal jargon to interpret this. “I’m sorry I worried you,” she says softly.

Silence. Then:

“We haven’t seen each other in a month,” he notes, and it is strange, it is natural, it is easy that they slip from confrontation into this, the sudden dialect of half-acknowledgments and sideways nods to things that are empirically true but too ephemeral to put direct voice to. “For someone who was so persistent, I was expecting something more like a dozen calls instead of radio silence.” Underneath, she hears _I was waiting for you, and you worried me._

“It’s silence on demand,” she teases. _I missed you. I never want to worry you._

“People still listen to silence?” _Never again?_

“Simon and Garfunkel wrote a whole song about it.” _Never again._

He clears his throat. “I’m already at the studio. We’re late enough getting started that I think it best for me to come to you. You can call your contact on the way down. Will you send me your address?

“Of course. Coffee on the way? There’s a little shop not far from my place. It’s nice. They’ve got a tea I think you’d like.”

“Certainly.” He hangs up; she texts him her address and allows herself the small, giddy luxury of a smile at her phone.

Of course, the luxury fades the minute she realizes that Strand is coming _to her apartment._

Which is not something she’s ever planned on.

Which is not something she’s remotely prepared for.

“Fuck,” she swears, glancing down at her pajamas and patting futilely at her hair. She’s certain it looks more like a sentient brillo pad than anything else at this point--hardly professional and certainly not the way she wants to greet her--

_Subject? Partner? Friend?_

Regardless of whatever nomenclature settles on his shoulders best, she knows she’s not even close to put together. Running late unsettles her on the best of days, and this is decidedly not the best of days. “Right,” she says to herself, “it’s thirty minutes from the studio to here. I’m already packed. I can shower. Get dressed. Meet him outside because I don’t want him in here.”

_Because if I get him in here,_ she thinks, not daring to voice the traitorous little thought out loud, _I’ll find a reason for us to never leave._

_Is this really the time and place, Reagan?_

She hustles through her routine with the ease of long practice: a five-minute shower, a hasty attempt at drying her hair, pulling it back into a messy bun when it doesn’t cooperate ( _it’s easier to have it entirely up or left down when driving, it leaves the long line of her neck bare, it makes the column of her throat an invitation--would he take it? Does she want him to?_ ). She tugs on her jeans, pulls on a soft, close-fitting shirt and a crimson cardigan, and scrambles for her shoes, her jacket, her recorder, her bag, and some sense of composure.

A double-check of everything (there’s her keys, her charger, her laptop, backup charger, recorder, batteries, her pre-packed suitcase courtesy of Common Sense Alex, her phone, her more-or-less constant sense of dread), and she heads out the door, turning out the lights and locking up behind herself.

Strand arrives fifteen minutes later in a sensible rental car that is nevertheless a class above what she’d have picked out. She grabs her bags, shouldering them easily, and heads over to the car. He’s parked in a visitor’s spot not far from the door, but instead of getting out to greet her, he merely makes cool eye contact with her through the windshield before popping open the trunk with the press of a button.

_Okay, so that’s...not what I expected._

She frowns, but they’re already running late, so she goes around to the back and slings her suitcase inside the trunk; her laptop bag will sit in the front seat with her, as always. She shuts the trunk, adjusts the laptop bag over her shoulder, and heads back up to the passenger side.

It’s locked.

Her frowns deepens, and she glances up to meet Strand’s eyes, icy and level. She hasn’t seen that look on his face since…

_...since The Empress Hotel,_ she realizes, and the giddiness she’d been trying to tamp down at the idea of seeing him for the first time in person since the power outage vanishes.

_Oh, fuck._

She knocks on the window and gestures down towards the lock. He looks down deliberately, then back up at her. She draws in a deep breath and tries to steady her racing heart. “Can you unlock this?” she asks loudly, mouthing the words as broadly as possible--she’s not sure what he can hear through the glass.

He nods, the action frost-crisp, but several seconds pass before he unlocks the door.

She doesn’t yank it open--she’s suddenly certain that if she moves too quickly, he’ll snap and go for her throat--but she does move purposefully, plopping down in the seat and settling the laptop bag between her feet before shutting the door. “I’m sorry I overslept,” she says as she buckles up. “I don’t want to waste your time.”

“At least you got some rest.”

She raises an eyebrow at him. From Nic, it would have been a statement of relief at most, consolation for the missed time at the least, but from Strand now? Venom, served at a temperature cold enough to burn.

“Yes, I haven’t been getting much sleep lately,” she says slowly, but he doesn’t turn to look at her or given much of any indication he’s listening, instead focusing on getting out of the parking lot and onto the main road with an intensity he has never demonstrated before. “Are...are you okay? You sounded fine on the phone earlier--did something happen? I am sorry I made us late--we can stop and get a coffee or whatever on the way--”

“I got you one already,” he interrupts. “Since we started out later than we had arranged.”

“Oh,” she replies, her voice soft, as she notices the two nondescript white paper to-go cups with their anonymous black lids perched in the drink holders by the steering column. “That was--thank you. That was kind of you, Richard.”

“Kind,” he repeats, as though the word is entirely foreign. “I suppose.”

“Yes, that’s what we call it when people do nice things for us,” she says. Every nerve in her thrums. This isn’t...right. It’s unexpected, certainly, given that the last time they shared a space, he’d spent a not-insignificant amount of time with his head between her thighs. Then, he’d been affection and fire, warmth and want, but now--

\--now he’s cold and harsh, and she doesn’t know _why_.

“Are you sure you’re okay with driving?” she ventures after several minutes of frosty silence. He’s made it to the freeway in more timely manner than she would have thought him capable of, given that he’s not a native driver, and the feeling of wrongness settling over her in a fog only thickens. “I can take over, if you’d--”

“It’s fine, Alex.”

The roar of highway traffic doesn’t drown out the pounding of her pulse in her ears. “Richard?”

“You should call your contact,” he says, and she sees his fingers tighten on the steering wheel. There’s a tic in his jaw, too, and while she’s completely certain he would never lay a hand on her, the depth of whatever he’s holding in is troubling. “Since we’re running _late_.”

“Right,” she agrees, mostly to stave off even more anxiety. She hasn’t felt this adrift around him since the very beginning, when he played hot-and-cold with her on a whim. “So I’ll...yeah. I’ll just do that now, then.”

She pulls out her phone and finds the number for the rare books dealer as Strand navigates the crush of traffic on I-5. She hits the call button and raises her phone to her ear, fumbling for her coffee with her free hand as the line rings.

It clicks as the dealer, a woman in her mid-forties with an egregiously warm voice, picks up. “Hello?”

“Hi, Cindy? This is Alex Reagan from Pacific Northwest Stories,” Alex greets her, shifting her grip on her coffee cup. “We have an appointment this afternoon about that book on music in ancient Mesopotamia...?”

“Alex!” Cindy’s voice is all the warmer for how frigid Strand is being, and Alex chances a look over at her companion even as the dealer keeps speaking; the tic has vanished from his jaw, but there is still tension coiled in him like a snake. “Yes, darling, of course. Are you still able to make it? I know it was such short notice, but this is the only free afternoon I’ll have for some time.”

“Yes, we’re still on our way,” Alex replies, “but we’re just running a little late--my fault, I’m afraid.”

“These things happen,” Cindy clucks. “Do you know when you’ll be arriving?”

“Just about an hour later than we’d originally planned on.” Alex raises the coffee cup to her lips to take a long drink, suddenly needing it more than allowed by the conventions of normal, polite conversation. “If that still works for--”

The coffee is still hot, which isn’t a problem. What _is_ a problem is the overwhelming bitterness of it. She hasn’t had black coffee in years and avoids it as much as possible; strong is good, yes, but so is palatable, and it is an immediately pressing struggle not to spit the mouthful of coffee out over the dash of the rental car.

“Alex?” Cindy sounds clearly concerned, which is more than she can say for the man driving. “Are you all right?”

She doesn’t even bother being subtle, shifting in her seat entirely to look Strand dead in the face. “Sorry, yes, I’m fine,” she says loudly. “I must have picked up the wrong coffee. So we’ll see you between two thirty and three?”

She barely hears Cindy agree and hang up. Her attention has cycled to focus directly on Strand, and a tiny, vicious part of her whispers, _Make him bleed._

“Do you want to explain this?” she asks with a level of calmness that surprises her, gesturing at him with her coffee cup.

“Do you want to explain why you gallivanted off to Turkey?”

His response is immediate. He does not take his eyes from the road. She has never wanted to throw a drink in his face quite as badly as this moment. “I don’t understand why you’re still upset. I already told you,” she says. “It was for the story, Richard.”

“Then that coffee was for the story as well.”

She counts to ten in her head, once forwards, once backwards, before she thinks she might be able to keep talking without smacking the ice straight off his face. “You know how I take my coffee. You haven’t gotten it wrong since...god, two years ago?” She brandishes the cup at him, and some of the hot coffee splashes out onto her hand. She draws in a sharp breath, not missing the instinctive concerned flicker of his eyes over to her, and this only makes the entire situation worse: he's _trying_ to be petty. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you?”

“You don’t just get on a plane by accident,” he snarls, snapping his gaze back to the freeway, any trace of worry gone. “You don’t buy an international ticket by accident. You don’t let a _murderer_ who is clearly not mentally well invite you to a country where you could disappear by accident.”

“Like you’ve never done something that didn’t make logical sense,” she clips back. “How about those missing five days, hm? Do we need to unpack _that_ now?”

“Do we need to unpack your almost pathological need to rush into things without considering all the consequences?”

“I’m a _journalist_ , Richard. I can’t play it safe all the time.”

His eyes are focused on the road as if they’re nailed there, and some inexplicable part of her misses the ice-hard blue. “But you can play it safe well enough to _not_ endanger your life,” he says after a long moment, “because some _child_ decided to ask you to drop everything and fly to an unstable country without thoroughly vetting everyone involved.”

Her grip tightens on the coffee cup. “I trust Simon.”

Now he does look at her properly, and in the face of his electric blue anger, she suddenly knows exactly what it is to be a lightning rod in a storm. “And what reason has he given you for that?” he demands, his mouth pressed into a thin line.

“He...is this an _interrogation_?”

“Shouldn’t it be?”

She puts the coffee cup back in the holder before she spills more; her hands are shaking with frustration. “You don’t have the right--”

“The right to what, Alex? Be concerned? Worry?” She hears it, then, that strange undercurrent that she’d heard on the phone earlier. “It’s not like we’re professional colleagues. It’s not like we’re--”

“Like we’re _what_?”

Her words hang in the air between them, heavy and loaded with a month of near-silence, a month of memories without the context of habit, a month of maybes and what-ifs and timetables that never lined up. “That’s not a fair question,” he says finally.

“I think it’s perfectly fair.”

He sighs, clearly frustrated. “Do you really want to have this conversation right now?”

She expects resignation from him at this point; she’s heard him before, when the weight of a conversation tipped him too far. Somehow his quiet sufferance is always worse than his anger. The familiarity of his tone doesn’t make it easier to hear, but she presses on anyway. “You certainly seem to,” she says.

“Oh, it matters what I want to do now?” he responds, still bitter, less cold. “You’re perfectly fine taking an international trip--”

She pinches the bridge of her nose. “It wasn’t like I was going on a study abroad--”

“Exactly my point.” His voice shakes, just a little; she only catches it because she’s spent so much time listening to it that she feels like its personal seismograph. “You weren’t going on a study abroad. You were following a sick young man’s directions to a country that could easily tear itself apart and take anyone with it.” His voice thickens, and his fingers tighten on the steering wheel, the words coming out quick and sharp. “Journalists have gotten killed for less, Alex, and I don’t know what I’d do if--”

He stops, biting back something she can nevertheless guess at.

“Oh,” she whispers, and the anger in her heart breaks just enough to let her care for this man through.

His grip softens, even if his tone doesn’t. “Yes, ‘oh.’”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t…” She twists her fingers together. “I’m sorry, Richard.”

“Yes, well.” His fingers drum on the steering wheel. “It’s done.”

“It is.” She shifts back in her seat, curling up against the door and resting her head against the window. This is familiar--how many long drives have ended up with him driving and her dozing in the front seat? More than the opposite, though the memory of Strand asleep with his seat as horizontal as it would go after a particularly long set of flights is, oddly, one of her more cherished ones.

She sighs and shifts again. The silence is heavy, though the anger seems to have dissipated. Some of the tension has eased from Strand’s shoulders, at least, and for want of anything else better to do or say, she reaches out and turns on the radio.

There is a crackle, then a familiar male voice. “--where’d you wanna go? How much you wanna risk? I’m not looking for somebody with some superhuman gifts--”

She turns off the radio immediately.

Strand glances over at her. “This car has bluetooth, you know.”

“Yes. Right.” She fumbles for her phone and ends up turning the radio on again. _Interns,_ she groans inwardly. _And their pop music and weirdly timely radio--_

“Do you have something against this song?”

It’s not much, but she recognizes what passes for a peace offering from Richard Strand. “The interns like it,” she says, not wanting to add that she knows all the words in spite of some serious indie music cred. “And I didn’t want to bring work into this right now.”

Something alters in his face. “Oh?”

She tilts her head--somehow she _recognizes_ that faint change. She hasn’t seen it before, but she knows suddenly, surely, that _this_ was the face that went along with reading her texts in the darkness on the other side of his office door, and just as suddenly, even without the anonymity of the dark, she wants to gather her courage and leap.

Carefully, she reaches out and rests her hand lightly on his leg--perfectly safe, perfectly friendly, partly apology, partly an advance--and there is no missing his sharp intake of breath at her touch. “Yeah,” she ventures. “I haven’t gotten to see you for a month, Richard. I thought--well, maybe I wanted you to myself for a little while.”

He glances over his shoulder to check for cars as he gets over a lane to get out from behind a particularly slow truck, which affords her a perfect view of the faint blush dusting his cheekbones. “Did you, now?” he asks, resettling into his seat.

For a moment, she’s sure he’ll reject anything she offers, but as he eases back into the flow of traffic, his right hand drifts off the steering wheel to rest on hers. “I do,” she says, turning her hand over to press her palm against his. “I’ve missed you, you know. Even with all my bad decisions to distract me.”

His hand is still for a moment; then, slowly, he twines his fingers with hers. “Was it just me you missed,” he says, rubbing his thumb against her skin, “or…?

Her fingers tighten around his. “I think you know.”

He looks over at her finally, and the cold from earlier has been replaced with straight heat. A flutter of want beats in her ribs. “When you texted when you were arranging this trip and said you wanted to stay overnight,” he tells her after a breath, “I took a certain liberty. I hope you don’t mind.”

“What liberty?”

“I booked the hotel.”

She blinks at him. “That’s not unusual--”

“A single room.”

“A single room,” she repeats.

“With a single bed.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ve read this story,” she murmurs with a smile.

“Ah, have you?” he counters with an easy grin, one she recognizes from even their earliest days of working together: it’s Richard Strand with a story, dangling it in front of her like something shiny. “Tell me, Alex--have you heard of the Heathman Hotel?”

The name sounds familiar, but she can’t place it precisely. “I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” she says lightly.

He laughs, that little huffy laugh she knows belongs to her alone, and some more of the tension eases from her heart. “It’s supposedly one of the most haunted hotels in America,” he says, his voice slipping smoothly in full professor-mode. “There are conflicting accounts--either a man fell from the window, or he committed suicide by jumping from the window of room 703. Since then, any of the rooms he fell past on the way down are said to be haunted in one form or another. Fairly typical descriptions of hauntings, of course--people have reported feeling a presence in a room even if it’s otherwise vacant, objects have apparently moved, that sort of thing.”

He stops and waits for a car to blare past, favoring them with an icy look that she knows is his equivalent of giving someone the finger, before turning back to her. “And of course,” he adds as the frost melts in his eyes, “there is something else about it that you might find interesting.”

“Oh?”

“It may be pandering more to Ms. DuMont, but--”

It clicks, then. “It was in _50 Shades of Grey_ , right?”

“You read that dreck?”

“For a story,” she reminds him. “But Nic read it for fun.”

She’s fairly certain she’s never seen Strand look more delighted.

“Don’t say a word to him,” she threatens.

Strand huffs a laugh but shakes his head. “I don’t want to bring him into this.”

“Into this?”

“Alex.” He’s looking at the road again--he’s a conscientious driver, by and large--but he raises their clasped hands to his lips and presses the barest kiss to her knuckles. “It’s a single room, and three’s company.”

_Oh._ She bites her lip. “What if there’s a ghost?” she manages to tease after a quick breath.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” he says automatically.

“Humor me.”

He sighs and untangles their fingers, and her heart plummets--but he captures her hand again, this time depositing a kiss at the base of her wrist. “Fine. Say there’s a ghost. What would you have me do, Alex?”

She swallows. There _are_ ghosts, and one of them is the phantom trace of his kiss against her pulse point. “Um...loud noises? I mean, all the research I’ve come across indicated that making loud noises and asking the spirits to leave is the first step.”

He gives her a long look before turning back to the road. “I’m not asking something that’s nonexistent to leave. That’s like asking your interns to have discretion or asking you to have some sense of self-preservation.”

She rolls her eyes. The comment stings, but she figures she owes him this one. “I thought you were humoring me.”

He hums and presses another kiss to her wrist. “Fine. Loud noises, then, Alex? If I recall correctly, you’re fairly good at making those.”

She flushes immediately.

His gaze is locked forward, but she can see a grin tug at the corners of his mouth. “What was it? Ah, yes--’just like that, Richard, please don’t stop, that feels so good,’ wasn’t it?”

“I will tuck and roll out of this car, I swear--”

His grip tightens on her wrist. “I’d rather you not. There’s a lot of traffic. You’d cause an accident, and we’re already running late.”

“If you’d rather I not, then don’t make fun of me for how _you_ make me sound, Richard.”

“ _Do_ I make you sound like that?”

She knows he’s not an overly expressive man by habit--years of cultivating the facade of a professional asshole have limited his typical expressions to a range from beleaguered resignation to straight dismissal--but she’s learned to read the fine print of his face. There is a certain cast to his jaw when he is trying to hide interest, one she can see now, and just the faintest arch of his brow, and somehow his eyes widen just a bit, just enough to show something like vulnerability ( _or_ , she reasons, _more likely fascination_ ).

“You do,” she says, letting her voice soften into cool silk. He’s well aware of what his voice does to her--

( _“I think sometimes you could make me come just by talking to me,” she’d confessed as she sprawled loose-limbed in his office chair, made open and honest by both the dark and the fact he’d spent the better part of a half hour languidly teasing her with his tongue towards an absolutely mind-shattering orgasm._

_“Do you, now?” he’d purred, leaning up from where he knelt to press a kiss against her neck. “Should we test that theory, Alex?”_

_She’d groaned--only partly brought on by the fact that his fingers were still continuing the work of his mouth. “I’m going to regret not keeping my mouth shut, aren’t I?”_

_“Oh, sweetling,” he’d breathed against her skin, “you have no idea.”)_

\--and it’s easy now to see what her voice does to him. She can watch his world shrink to the insular space of the car, containing now only him, her, her voice, and his one-handed white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel.

“Did you like it when I begged for you, Richard?” she asks.

He clears his throat. “This has nothing to do with ghosts, Alex.”

“I think it has everything to do with ghosts,” she says. “What’s a ghost but a memory that lingers in a different way than expected?”

“Are you seriously trying to start a philosophical discussion about ghosts in relation to--”

“--to the fact that the last time we were in a room together, we had sex in your office twice and then barely even had time to say good morning before you had to leave? Absolutely.”

He blinks. She stares at him evenly.

“I thought about it,” she continues. “A lot. And often. It was so pretty that morning, and we had to run around and get everything packed instead of spending all that time in bed. It was the first time I’d slept well in...well, almost a year, Richard, and I woke up feeling like myself again, and I--I wanted to share that with you.

“I wanted to see if you’d still touch me like you had in the dark, even when there was light.” Her voice softens, and she turns her wrist in his grip so that she can press the very tips of her fingers to his arm. “When it was real and not just something we could have imagined together. I’m sure you’ve got some word for that in your head, and I wanted to prove it wrong. And then you were gone, and I was gone, and then it was just like everything in the universe was working together to keep us apart, and I thought it was just...a fluke, I guess. And it felt like a ghost, because it was haunting me and no one else could see it.”

Around them, the buzz of traffic, and the faint purr of the engine, and Strand’s sharp breath.

“So tell me, Richard,” she says, quietly, because there is a not-small part of her that isn’t sure he won’t startle away, “is that a ghost? Or is it something else you can disprove?”

He doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Her stomach knots. “I’m sorry,” she mumbles, wondering if wrenching her hand out of his grip is bad form or self-preservation. “I shouldn’t have--”

“I can’t disprove it.”

She blinks. “What?”

I-5 is not nearly as fascinating as he’s acting like it is, but she understands a security blanket when she sees one; the curve of the highway through construction zones towards Puyallup is banal as ever, but he is cataloguing every tree that passes by like it holds the key to unlocking how to function without his copious amounts of childhood trauma and general armor of arrogance. “I can’t,” he says again. “Disprove it, I mean. I thought of you often.”

“You did?”

He nods once, sharply, as if anything less controlled would mean everything would shatter. “You are a _distraction,_ Alex. It didn’t matter what I did--you were _everywhere_.” He presses his lips together and drops her wrist, settling both hands on the steering wheel again. His fingers drum against it in agitation. “Everything I packed that day somehow smelled like you. Even after a shower, your scent lingered on my skin.”

“Scent is most closely tied to memory,” she says softly.

“And what is a ghost but a memory that lingers in a different way than expected?” he echoes, his grip tightening on the wheel. “I hadn’t realized how much of my life had shifted to accommodate you--how much I had grown to expect that accommodation. To know you in a different way than I had planned on...it simply tilted my life further on its axis, and there is far too much concrete evidence of that for me to allow it be disproven.”

“What kind of evidence?”

He steels his shoulders, takes in a deep breath, and lets it out with painstaking slowness. “Do you remember telling me how Mondays are rough for you because you’re too worried about sleeping through an alarm by accident after you’ve had a weekend to reset your schedule?”

She nods.

“You told me once-- _once_ \--that you liked extra shots in your coffee on Mondays for that reason, and it is completely habit now to order it for you that way.” He checks the mirrors for the flow of traffic, then looks directly over at her. “If I,” he continues, “don’t leave the house at the right time in the morning to allow me to get over to the coffee shop I know you like, then I hit traffic that adds twenty minutes to my commute on a good day--so I folded you into that routine. I woke up in Chicago and was dressed and out the door on my way to get you coffee before I remembered that I’d woken up alone, with you twenty-two hundred miles away, waking up without me.”

His eyes are perfectly steady, perfectly blue, and more open than she’s ever seen. She bites her lip. “I hated waking up without you,” she confesses.

He flushes again and looks back at the road. “As did I,” he says after a moment. “It was...distressing, how easily I grew accustomed to you being so close.”

Her fingers drum against the taut denim of her jeans. “Then why fight with me, Richard?”

“Because,” he says evenly, “I was thinking of never being able to wake up with you again, Alex, and I found that infuriating.”

She blinks at him. “What? Why was that--”

“Infuriating?” He glances sideways at her, then stretches out his arm to curl his hand over the curve of her neck into her shoulder. Her world shrinks to the five points of fire that are his fingertips tracing idle circles into her skin. “I don’t believe in Hell, Alex. Just as there is enough wonder in the world as it stands, there is enough torment, too--but if I _were_ a man to believe in Hell, I know my corner would be filled with nothing but the knowledge that I had tasted the sweetness of you once and never could again.”

His touch dips below the collar of her shirt, fingertips drifting against her collarbone. “You’ll have to forgive me,” he says, his tone still carefully level, his gaze still forward, “for reacting so strongly, but I sat for too long with every part of me aching for you, and to imagine you being so...so _flippant_ \--”

She reaches up and rests her hand on his. “Richard, you know I didn’t--”

“Plan to leave?” His fingers dig into her skin, just a touch, and she bites back a pleasured hiss; there’s too much to unpack immediately about how much his possessiveness means to her, and so she simply acknowledges the feeling and tucks it away for later.

He continues as though he’s completely unaware he’s still talking; his focus is directed entirely towards the curve of I-5, and hers is directed entirely towards him. “Let me tell you about a plan, Alex. I plan on spending a significant amount of time this evening giving you every reason to stay in bed with me. Tomorrow morning, too. I plan on seeing exactly what your face looks like you come undone. I plan on coaxing as much pleasure from you as you can stand, and then I plan on coaxing more from you after you can’t stand on your own anymore. I plan on fucking you, Alex, as gently or as roughly as you want, and I plan on doing everything in my power to make you beg so prettily for me again.”

She’s absolutely certain that her cheeks are crimson, just as absolutely certain that the only thing preventing her from jumping him immediately is the fact that they’re in a moving vehicle that he’s operating. “Richard, I--”

_Scooby-Dooby Doo, where are you? We’ve got some work to do now!_

Both of them immediately glance over at her phone. “It’s Nic,” she says, want shifting immediately to embarrassment. Strand draws his hand away from its place on her neck, and she tries not to whimper at the loss of his touch. “The interns made us all change our ringtones as a team-building exercise or maybe a meme? I don’t know--”

_Scooby-Dooby Doo, where are you? We need some help from you now!_

“He’s not going to hang up--if he’s calling, it’s for a reason.” She’s babbling, she’s sure of it, but knowing Nic has access to her--to them--at this moment makes her feeling like they’re being watched. “I’ll just handle this--Nic! Hi!”

“Alex!” comes Nic’s relieved voice from the other end of the line. “I wasn’t sure I’d get ahold of you!”

“Yep, well, we’re still driving down to Oregon, so…” She chances a look over at Strand. He seems composed enough, but there is pink still on his face. Carefully, she reaches out and touches his knee; he shifts in his seat but doesn’t shake her off.

“Really? Do you have a long ways yet to go?”

“I overslept,” she tells him, running her fingers over the smooth press of Strand’s trousers. “So we got started a little bit late. Did you need something, or…?”

“Well, it’s funny, actually,” her producing partner says, “but I’m going to be in Portland later today myself--I’ve got a friend there who invited me down, but she’s not going to be free until late, so I was wondering if you were going to be in town for awhile? I thought maybe you’d like to meet up for a drink or something?”

She blinks. “Um.”

“Dr. Strand can come, too, if he wants to,” Nic continues cheerily. “If it’s not too late, I mean. I figured you’d just be heading back up after rush hour tonight.”

“We’re going to stay overnight, actually.” Her tone is perfectly friendly, perfectly normal, but her mind is racing. Nic is--well, she’s not exactly sure _what_ Nic is, anymore; his little foray into an eldritch murder cabin has only made him sharper and weirdly perceptive, and suddenly she feels like he can see the way her pulse is still pounding, the way she can’t tear her eyes away from Strand, the way her mind keeps circling back to _I plan on doing everything in my power to make you beg so prettily for me again._ “Richard--Dr. Strand--found a haunted hotel--”

“Supposedly haunted,” Strand interjects, and she grins at him.

“A _supposedly_ haunted hotel,” she corrects, “and I thought it might be good filler, if we need it.”

“Oh. That makes sense.” A pause. “Is it the Heathman? Like in _50 Shades_?”

“I keep forgetting you’ve read that,” she teases.

“Liar.” Nic laughs, and some of the nerves edge away from her. “Listen, I think there’s one of those fancy Portland bars with a weird theme pretty close by--how about I meet you there at nine? Bring the good doctor with you. It’d be nice to catch up with you--I know you’ve been working on edits for me, and I appreciate that a lot, but we’re not just the show, you know? I’ll buy you a drink.”

“You owe me more than one for how much work you’ve had me put in,” she tells him, but she doesn’t miss the way Strand’s eyes tighten. _Oh. Plans. Right._ “But listen, maybe just one drink? We had some research to do, and I want to make sure I can at least _try_ to get some sleep.”

“Sounds good,” Nic agrees before he bids her a cheery goodbye and hangs up.

There is a stretch of silence. “So we’re having a drink with your colleague,” Strand says finally. “That sounds...diverting.”

“Listen, it’s not my first choice, either,” she says, squeezing his knee. “But I don’t want Nic getting involved with this right now. It’ll be better to head him off at the pass than try to hide things later, don’t you think?”

Strand doesn’t respond; she knows him well enough to know that this is his version of pouting.

“Hey.” She waits until he glances over and then lets a wicked grin curl the corners of her mouth. “You weren’t the only one with plans, Richard. I’ve thought about this, too.”

“Have you?” he murmurs.

She nods. “And I planned on taking you out somewhere nice. Fancy. A cut above roadside diners and hotel bars. I brought a dress to match the setting.”

He blinks at her with a little frown. “You...brought…?”

“Maybe I wanted to look nice for you, Richard. Maybe I wanted to see if a little black dress could make _you_ beg so prettily for me.” She runs her fingers up the crease of his pants, higher and higher until he drops one hand to grasp her wrist tightly.

“I _am_ driving, Alex,” he reminds her, and she can see the flush in his cheeks deepen.

“Well, if you’re good,” she tells him, primly folding her hands in her lap, “and if you sit through a drink-- _one drink_ \--with Nic, maybe I’ll let you take it off me in the bar bathroom.”

“The bar bathroom…?”

“Why, did you want to wait?”

He looks over at her fully; she meets his gaze and doesn’t waver. She’s not sure what he’s looking for in her eyes, but he seems to find it. “No,” he says finally, “I suppose I don’t.”

“Good. Then behave.”

He turns back to the road, a small smile on his face. “I will if you will.”

She laughs and settles back into her seat, turning up the radio and pressing her feet against the dashboard. This is better--comfortable, familiar, with their typical undercurrent of want running like a live wire beneath their conversations. It might, she knows, just be the usual l’appel du vide, but it soothes her in a way she can’t quite parse and doesn’t want to--when the void beckons wearing the face of her companion, how could she ignore its call? “Oh, Richard,” she tells him fondly, “when do I _not_ behave?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I definitely intended on having this up...well, a couple weeks ago, honestly, and then that clearly didn't happen, so thank you all for your patience with me. <3
> 
> Couple of things: I would be incredibly remiss if I did not bring up the wonderful Aproclivity's Turkey fic, The Trickery of Time Zones and Sleep Schedules. When I was working on the argument these two nerds have, she brought up the fact that it would be about Turkey time for them and let me see her draft of TTZSS. Her take is really wonderful and definitely inspired their argument here, so please check it out if you'd like! <3
> 
> (And also a thousand thanks to Aproclivity, who has been through entirely too many sessions of my hand-wringing and anxiety. Love you, friend!)
> 
> Also I will (hopefully!) update a lot faster next time because I actually might kind of know where I'm going with it? 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who read and/or left a comments/kudos. Y'all make my day, and I appreciate you very much. <3

**Author's Note:**

> The working title for this document was, in fact, Dicking Around.
> 
> I couldn't bring myself to post it as such with a straight face.
> 
> Dedicated to Aproclivity, whom I adore.
> 
> More to follow.


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